(Please Note: This is a serialized follow-up essay to, and meant to be read after reading “Peep Show.” If you missed ’em, here’s part one and here’s part two and here’s part three and here’s part four and here’s part five)
Spring 2005. In my San Francisco neighborhood bar, among a group of friends, I see a woman who looks very familiar. I stare at her for too long, trying to figure out where I know her from and why I’m so perplexed to see her here, how she looks both extremely familiar and utterly out of place. Finally, she fixes her gaze on me for several seconds and then turns abruptly away – that’s when I recognize her as a stripper. She looks very different in clothes – ‘80s punk-disco thrift-store trendy and nerdy, with big clunky glasses. She slouches. On stage and naked, she does the opposite of slouch, throws her shoulders back to accentuate her smallish, pert, pierce-nippled breasts. I know her with two nipple rings that she tantalizingly plays with, and with a much saucier attitude – I know her in another persona, another universe entirely. A few minutes later, she comes over to me at the bar. She’s obviously a little drunk, and says, playfully, loudly enough to be heard by others, “I won’t tell anyone where I know you from if you don’t tell anyone where you know me from.” And then she walks away. It occurs to me that, for the first time ever, I wouldn’t care all that much if she told everyone where she knows me from, the Lusty Lady, and that feels great. She looks over at me from time to time. I can’t tell if she wants to talk to me more or is uncomfortable that I’m there. If I could be sure she wanted to talk, I would go over and talk. Instead, I move to the other end of the bar to say hello to another friend, and when I look for her a little while later, she’s gone.
I see her again at the Lusty a month or so later. I’m about to move to the east coast in a few days – this visit is part of a late-night nostalgia binge. She asks how I am, and how’s my dog (whom I’d brought with me to the bar that night). Then she tell the other strippers on stage what a cute little doggie I have, and I get a little embarrassed. “You don’t usually come out this late, do you?” she asks, and I say no, that in fact I haven’t been to the club in a long time. “Been keeping to yourself,” she says, and we both laugh. Yes, keeping to myself, I think, as opposed to jerking off in front of strange women in a little glass booth. She tells me about how she sees someone she knows on the other side of the glass at least once a week. She goes on, “Sometimes it’s creepy like when someone from high school shows up, but I mean it’s bound to happen, and you’re alright, I mean, you don’t hate women.”
“No, I don’t,” I say, looking up and down at her lovely body, her softness, her smoothness, her studded nipples, her huge eyes on her goofy-cute Betty Boop face, listening to her words, “I don’t hate women at all.”
“You’re not going to chop me up into little bits,” she goes on in her charming affected ditziness, making meat-cleaver motions with both hands for a moment, stopping dancing to do so. I start to lose my erection in a hurry.
“No, I’m not.” She goes back to dancing, first a mini-jitterbug and then something marginally more sultry, and I go back to jerking and she mentions my dog one more time, and I give her a look like c’mon you’re really blowing my buzz here and she says “Kidding,” and shrugs her shoulders and I say I know, and I go back at it and eventually I do come, which she either doesn’t notice or has no intention of acknowledging. This is not a particularly sexy interaction. It is ridiculous and amusing, though.
When I wave goodbye she says, “Aw, you’re leaving.” Then, “You know I think I saw you in the park once too. See I’m the one who’s stalking you,” and she makes a monster face and claws with her hands and growls and I respond in kind. I think to myself that this may be my last interaction of this absolutely weird sort, ever. I may never be here again. Maybe a little embarrassed at her display and because she told me that she had noticed me in the park, she steps back from the glass and says “Well, bye” and I wave. I’m gone before the window even fully closes.
